Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-24323813-20140310033154/@comment-1399757-20140310181926

I'll take a bite - though religious discussion has come under a lot of strictures lately - don't be surprised if this gets deleted. So in the name of good will, here's my pitch. ;)

''1. There's no evidence for it—it's just faith based. All the "evidence" for it is easily refutable.'' First off that's not an actual arguement - it's the premise of the rest of your post. It's subjective to the rest of your assertions being valid, hence it shouldn't be listed as a point.

''2. It hinders progress. Religion has always gotten in the way of society, causing scientific knowledge to be stifled, people to be massacred without cause, etc. People are fanatic about it.'' Point is entirely subjective and dual-faced. One can easily mark out all the inconsistencies of members of an opposing group, but you seem incapable of paying homage to the good side of religion as well. I can just as easily mark out the numerous atheistic forces (Communism) within the last 100 years who have caused more human death and suffering than all religious regimes throughout history combined and impeded human progress completely, if not actually reversing human progress itself. But that said, not all atheists are Communists, nor are most Christians burning people on the stake or running supposed holy wars. You can't make such a generalized point without simultaneously staining your own philosophy's reputation ten-fold what you accuse religious philosophy of. That said, religions have always been the pioneers of science - I don't know where you get your information from. In fact at was Catholics who developed the Scientific Method, Galileo was Catholic, a Catholic priest who developed the Big Bang Theory, the American founding fathers were almost entirely composed of people who belived devoutly in Divine Providence (kind of quasi-Christian for the most part), it was Hindus and Muslims who developed the numeric system you just used to list your points, Roman pagans who developed the Empire's vast and beautiful architecture that has continued to inspire architects to this day, a Christian named Martin Luther King Jr. who fought against racial discrimination, and there are a plethora of other remarkable figures who were quite deeply religious. We can't really be sure that we'd have made it to the Industrial age yet if it weren't for religion, as religion has always functioned as a structure under which man gathers in unison towards a greater cause. There are contingencies of course, just like any other facet of human life, but atheists aren't the ones to be talking with regard to that if you hold your own philosophy to your own generalized points.

''3. It's old. We invented religion because we could not explain the universe. Now, we can. We don't need religion for answers anymore—science provides them.'' Dirt is old too, and yet here you are probably a young person, born due to the nutrients which it bore for your parents and your parents before them - would you spurn dirt then for being old? Religion is not just an explanation of the universe but an explanation for all things: God is what we call the First Cause - in the case of Christianity that Cause being sentient and eternally perfect. We aren't hypothesizing that a sky-man drops water to the earth, but that everything comes from something. To suppose that all the universe always was as it is is a logical fallacy of course, and in the same suit if you hypothesize that the universe came from a black hole, wormhole, or any other scientific phenomena beyond our immediate scope of total understanding (which it is), your hypothesis is effectively as subjective as the idea that that process also had a point of origination in something beyond the current measure (not that anything in modern science is legitimately contentious towards the prospect of God). In other words, atheistic theories are legitimately as subjective as you claim religion to be, if not more, because Christianity simply recognizes that somewhere along the line everything stems from a singular perfect source. That atheists have nothing to supplement for that leaves something to be desired.